In college, I was living in Amsterdam and a friend lent me a copy of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. As I read it in my bedroom with a black and white psychedelic Ikea comforter, I found myself pouring into Feinberg’s story, longing to try on the contours of Feinberg’s life as a trans activist. At the same time, I felt sunken. I could never be a revolutionary like Feinberg and therefore, I thought, I could never be trans. This is the problem with clutching a single portrayal of trans life. We—writers, trans folks, everyone—model ourselves on each other. We need nourishment: a vast range of narratives, styles, and lives.
In that newly-oxygenated context, I started writing Future Feeling as a container for the messiness and the exuberance of trans existence as I knew it, weaving in equal parts despair and magic. In the book, Penfield—a fed-up dog-walker—hexes a trans influencer, attempting to send him to The Shadowlands, a dark psychic landscape. The hex goes awry, and Penfield must work together with the influencer to help undo the damage he has caused.
Now that the door has opened, a stream of vital new trans books is coming out, and together, they give trans folks—and others—new ways of imagining ourselves.
We Both Laughed in Pleasure, Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma’s compilation of Lou Sullivan’s diaries, is an archival wonder. A very gay, freaky, activist, Sullivan chronicles desire, self-loathing, rock n’roll scenes, AIDS, and mortality. Early on in his San Francisco days, he writes:
“Sat aft went to see David Bowie’s movie. Came outa there envisioning how beautiful he is + how I could look just like him if only I’d …[sic] more thoughts of mastectomy (that word sounds like a species of dinosaur) + sterilization. There’s a TV-TS drop-in rap group in Berkeley…I should go + talk this out, get it settled in my mind once + for all, one way or the other.”
As we read, there is a sense that Sullivan was always writing to future trans generations. Also, carrying a pink book with a butt on it around the subway was a joy unto itself.
“The thing no one ever told Harold about THE DEVIL is that when you see them you get uncontrollably aroused.” With language that is somehow contemporary and archetypal, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s poetry collection reveals the monstrous and the liberatory. Endlessly inventive and punctuated with lines that beg to be read aloud, these poems respond to the crushing structures that act on those who are Black, queer, and disabled.
An oozy balm for cosmic loneliness, My Meteorite by Harry Dodge throbs, reverberates, and in many ways, takes on the unquantifiable energy of the intergalactic rock that he buys from eBay. He writes:
“…All things, including bodies, are perpetually changing, being formed and affected by the force of every legible and illegible collision, from intestinal bacteria to inheritable traits to a cold breeze and so it might be correct to say that this thing I call myself is much more fluid and larger than I’ve been schooled to believe.”
Ecstatic and heady, the book is also deeply tethered to the meatiness of relationships, human-human, parent-child, machine-human, human-earth, and otherwise.
Anaïs Duplan’s collection of essays and poems, Blackspace, tilts towards the conditions and mundanity of freedom, as Duplan seeks out Black and Brown artists “in whose work [he sees] a strangeness, the avant-garde, a refusal, and yet a pop sensibility. Not a total turn away from the public, but a three-quarter turn.”
Duplan excavates the archive, replete with misunderstandings and violences, tracing and reconfiguring meaning in work both at the fringes and at the center (Adam Pendleton’s conceptualization of Rosa Parks as an avant-garde figure, video art archives, “outsider artist” James Hampton’s The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly). In the final essay, Duplan becomes his own subject as he starts to bring this radically expansive project into relation with his own need for freedom as a Black trans* man, a freedom to stop performing and over-exerting, and be.
Lyrical and expansive, Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night weaves together two narrative strands: Nadir, a non-binary young Syrian American mourning the death of his mother, and Laila, a queer artist whose diary Nadir possesses. The search for an elusive bird links these two protagonists together. Laila writes in her diary, “The elders in my family have always said the birds went before us, long before the first of our families set off across the sea. Even before we left Syria, they’d spoken of these sixty wings, thirty arrow-shaped figures stark and snowy, an absence of color, shocks of light,” exemplifying Joukhadar’s rich and textured prose and the way it captures deep affect around immigration, selfhood, family, and memory.
To read this anthology is like walking through a crowded Brooklyn queer party (when that was a thing), turning to watch people move, picking up snips of language, delighted by style, by outrage, by the expression of desires. Edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, this tome brings together the work of essential trans poets as they question, demand, complicate, lyricize, enjoy the mundane, theorize, mythologize. Inviting radical trans poets to inhabit the same space creates a super-charge, a place of swirling, numinous energy, of beingness and belonging within limitless complexities. Even the page numbers are sexy.
Jamie Hood’s How to Be a Good Girl is a roving vessel of selfhood and of her “writerly preoccupation [with] the architectural & affective bizarrities of desire.” Notably hard to excerpt because of the swerves in tone, these poems assemble a self wrought of trauma and the resonance that resists its collapse. In this book, it’s okay to want to be good and to not be good and to loathe goodness and to want to be good only in sexual play, and every other permutation.
Exuberantly messy while also situated perfectly within the genre of domestic fiction, Detransition, Baby follows Ames, Katrina, and Reese as they move through their fraught, entangled, and embodied lives. Peters goes right to the psychic core of her characters and of our confused culture at large. She writes:
“heterosexual cis people, while willfully ignoring it, have staked their whole sexuality on a bet that each other’s genders are real. If only cis heterosexuals would realize that like trans women, the activity in which they are indulging is a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood, they’d be free to indulge in a whole new flexible suite of hot ways to lie to each other.”
In this series of shimmering letters, to friends, to a former lover, to Toni Morrison, and ultimately, to themself, Akwaeke Emezi opens a portal into the brutality and beauty of their own self-creation and ambivalent embodiment. Moving between cosmological seeking to pointed details about becoming a successful artist, they show us the immense potency of their spiritual existence, admitting:
“I keep halfway secrets, like how failure isn’t one of my fears; I’m only afraid of what I could become if I stopped being tentative, if I rooted myself instead in that dizzying sense of invincibility.”
They trace their pathway to having created a lush, at times haunted, dwelling in their words and in their New Orleans bungalow, Shiny the godhouse.
When Jane Mayer met Cordy Spaacks, she was at that stage of life in which all things look possible. She was full of energy and high spirits. The windows of her apartment faced a pretty street. She had begun to teach for the first time, and her students had liked her at once. The face that was reflected back at her from the mirror was more than confident—it was willing. She felt rather as athletes feel when they are in top form. Her life had assumed a shape she found entirely agreeable, and the circumstances she found herself in filled her with happiness. She was absolutely ripe to fall in love.
She met Cordy at a faculty tea. This tea was held for the Humanities Department, in which Jane taught English literature. Cordy was in the Physics Department, but the Humanities tea was famous for excellent if small sandwiches, and Cordy liked a free meal when he could find one. Each Thursday he ambled over to the formal room in which the tea was held, guest of a pal in the French Department. This pal, the sort of well-meaning fool you get to play Cupid in a campus production about Saint Valentine, had met Jane, who was new to the university. He also knew that Cordy was unattached, and since Jane and Cordy struck him as two of the most attractive people he had ever seen, he felt an obligation to bring them together. He knew that Cordy had been divorced. He did not know that Cordy had spent the last four months of his unhappy four-year marriage in almost total silence or that the failure of this marriage was in large part attributable to Cordy, who had wed a slightly addled girl and then paid her back for it. This, however, is not the sort of information that generally falls into the hands of nonprofessional matchmakers, and it was with a sort of flourish that he led Cordy over to Jane.
Jane had just come from delivering a lecture on Charlotte Brontë and she was in fine appetite. The introduction was made as she stood next to a plate of the famous sandwiches. The well-meaning pal withdrew beaming, leaving Cordy to watch Jane knock back seven of these sandwiches and wash them down with a cup of lukewarm tea.
“Are all your appetites that voracious?” asked Cordy.
“Yes,” said Jane. “Aren’t everyone’s?”
Thus they announced themselves, had either bothered to notice. That small interchange might have been a pair of policy statements, and neither would have needed to say another word. Instead, Jane thought that the word Cordy brought to mind was “winsome.” He had a true grin, a slightly manic chuckle, and a very beautiful mouth. Furthermore, he was clearly smart—she could tell at once. Cordy noticed that Jane’s hair was the color of taffy, that her eyes were green, and that she was a unique combination of style and intelligence. They retired to a corner to begin a conversation during which they fluttered brilliance at one another. They agreed instantly on everything. Jane felt her best self emerge—charming, passionate, and original. Fate had handed her the perfect other. In Cordy’s brown eyes Jane saw the reflection of the effect she was creating. Cordy, who before his marriage had broken hearts in many of our nation’s finer institutions of higher learning, was captivated. After several days of similar meetings in other settings and one spectacular kiss, the setup for which Cordy engineered by taking the ribbon out of Jane’s hair, they were inseparable. Night after night you might see them in the library, their chairs close together. Under the table, if you were on your hands and knees, you could see Jane’s shoeless foot resting on top of Cordy’s sock.
In the fine tradition of romantic beginnings Cordy and Jane exchanged edited versions of their life histories. Jane learned that Cordy was rich. His name was Arthur Corthauld Spaacks. Everyone in his family had a baby’s name, a nickname, or some other corruption of that which appeared on their baptismal certificates. His mother, Constance, was Contie. His father, Corthauld, was Hallie. His brother, Christian, was merely Chris, while his sister, Mercia, was called Mousy by all.
Jane learned that Cordy had married a girl named Lizzie Meriweather and that they had produced a child whose name was Charlie. On the subject of his marriage, Cordy seemed puzzled. It simply hadn’t worked, he claimed. Jane knew that his divorce was rather recent and that recently divorced people are always puzzled. So Jane turned to the subject of his family life and asked him how he got along with his parents and siblings. To illustrate the point, Cordy told Jane about the last big Spaacks family outing. Everyone had been married at the time. Cordy to Lizzie, Mousy to Bobby LaVallet, the no-good heir to a racing stable, and Chris to a Canadian girl named Valerie Slowden. Of the three Spaacks children, only Chris remained in the married state.
The Spaacks seniors ran three households: a pied-à-terre in Manhattan; the family manse in Furnall, Connecticut; and a summer house in Salt Harbor. To Salt Harbor the family had repaired for an Easter weekend. There everyone fought. Cordy and Lizzie, when they spoke at all, argued bitterly in private. Cordy raked gravel with his father, both muttering about Mousy’s behavior in an effort to avoid actually speaking to one another. Mousy, when she could be dragged away from fighting with her mother, quarreled with her father. Mousy and Bobby spent their time frantically looking for a place in which to smoke hashish unobserved. This prevented them from noticing that they had almost nothing to say to one another. Their son, Little Quentie, was knocked down by his cousin, Charlie, and cut his lip. He began to howl and Charlie began to scream.
Chris and Valerie had no children, and they never quarreled. They brought with them to Salt Harbor their pet, a basset hound named Tea. Tea was sick in many places, hidden and plain, around the house, but found the sea air restoring. At the dinner table, Chris and Valerie were made to feel uncomfortable about not having any children. No one approved of this. They sat in silence and watched the marriages around them crumble. Meanwhile, Lizzie cowered by the beach. She aligned herself with Bobby and Mousy and spent as much of the weekend as she could swacked out on a form of cannabis called Durban Poison, which Bobby had scored from a South African acquaintance.
This lack of felicity was not unusual. In fact, it was daily life to its participants. The closest thing to affection was displayed by Chris and Cordy, when Chris gave Cordy a tip on the stock market and Cordy fixed the radio in Chris’s car. The climax of the weekend came at Easter Sunday lunch. Spaacks senior presided, carving the tough flinty ducks, smiling the dim sort of smile you see on freshly killed corpses.
Jane listened to this recitation with real sorrow. How awful it was that Cordy did not have nice, warm parents like hers. Her doting parents took her to the opera on her birthday. Cordy needed salvation, and love, Jane felt, would surely save him.
It was Jane’s apartment that revealed her to Cordy. It was small but crammed with artifacts: watercolors, family photographs in velvet frames, teapots, pitchers, and beautiful plates. On his first visit Cordy surveyed the place and asked: “How do you get any work done here?”
His own apartment had almost nothing in it. What he had was either rented with the flat or picked up from the Salvation Army. The Mayers were a family of watered-down German and Dutch Jews who had once had a lot of money. Now they had things. They had Persian rugs, English silver, Limoges plates, and Meissen soup tureens. It was from Cordy that Jane learned the lesson so valuable to the haute bourgeoisie: that some people have a good deal of money and almost nothing else.
Jane sat Cordy down to the first of their many home-cooked meals. She made an omelet, a simple one, with cheese and chives. Cordy appeared to be transported. He had never had such an omelet—not even in France, he said.
“How did you learn to cook like this?” he asked, marveling. “When I cook eggs, they lie around in my stomach all day. Yours nip right into my bloodstream.”
“What sort of eggs do you cook?”
“Well, I get up in the morning, put some corn oil in a pan, turn the light on under it, and then I shower, shave, and dress. When I get back to the kitchen, the pan is about the temperature of a Bessemer converter. I beat the eggs and put some spice in…”
“What spice?”
“Some stuff I found in the apartment when I moved in. The other tenants left it behind. Chervil, savory. Is there something called turmeric? Then I throw the eggs in, and they immediately turn into an asbestos mat.”
“It’s very easy not to make eggs like that,” Jane said. “I could show you in a second.”
“I don’t have time to think about food,” said Cordy. “Besides, no one ever offered to teach me. If I got used to eggs like yours, I might find myself getting used to a whole slew of other things and end up leading a soft life and not getting any work done. Furthermore, I wouldn’t be in a position to ask you for another. May I have one?”
The work Cordy referred to was his dissertation. Since he had been a researcher at a think tank for several years, he felt at a slight disadvantage: teachers younger than Cordy already had their doctorates. He felt he should have his as well. This thesis was sitting on his desk, as it had been for some time. Jane suspected that she was his current excuse for putting it off and that, since he was regarded by his department as one of its young geniuses, it didn’t much matter when he finished it. She was working on her dissertation, which her affair with Cordy in no way interrupted. In fact, she felt she was working better than ever. After dinner, she sat at the kitchen table with her books, while Cordy sprawled on the couch with his, but although he claimed her apartment distracted him, he also claimed the distraction was worth it. He was happier than he had ever been, he said.
Jane used lavender soap, which Cordy found extremely pleasing. One day she slipped a cake of it into his briefcase and, when he discovered it, his eyes misted over.
“No one ever gave me a present before,” he said. He said it with such a tremor in his voice that Jane did not stop to say to herself: “This guy has a trust fund. What does he mean he never got a present before?” She believed it. She believed that he had had presents before on occasions but not on the spur of the moment, simply because someone adored him. She believed. Here was a man deprived, and there is no greater magnet for a generous woman than a deprived man.
The food he ate before he met Jane, whose use of olive oil in salads he frequently remarked on, consisted of instant coffee, powdered milk, and dried mashed potatoes. He was addicted to cafeterias and claimed a fondness for food that had been warming on a steam table for several days. Jane had previously believed that people who ate this way were poor people who were forced to eat this way, but then Cordy, who was in his thirties, still had some of the clothes he had worn at prep school and almost all of the clothes he had taken away to college. He seemed to feel, like William Penn, that if it was clean and warm it was enough, but Cordy was not a Quaker and had an independent income.
Here was a man deprived, and there is no greater magnet for a generous woman than a deprived man.
When Jane visited each of the three Spaacks households, she began to understand her lover a little better. The first she saw was the Manhattan pied-à-terre. Lizzie Meriweather Spaacks, after a trip to the Dominican Republic shed her of Cordy, had retired with Charlie to the country. Once a month, Cordy took Charlie for the weekend, and since Lizzie refused to see Cordy, Charlie was trucked in from the country, and the Spaackses’ Manhattan apartment was used as a dead drop, so to speak. When their affair had progressed by several months, Cordy took Jane along to collect Charlie one Saturday afternoon.
The Spaacks apartment was small but grand. It looked out over the river and was decorated in the way of the reception rooms in foreign embassies. It was full of the sort of furniture you feel you must not sit on—either upholstered in silk or extremely fragile. The most inviting was the couch, but this was covered in a putty-color velvet that is stained so easily by a misplaced hand or foot. Jane stood by the window and watched garbage scows float the debris of Manhattan out to the Ambrose Lighthouse. The Spaackses, Cordy told her, referred to these vistas as “river traffic.” On the walls were Chinese prints, matted with gray silk, that decorators feel bring a soothing tone into the homes of bankers and other corporate capitalists.
When Cordy appeared with Charlie, a white-haired child with tiny teeth, Jane felt she had been delivered. But behind Cordy was Spaacks senior, an apparition Jane had not bargained for. He was wearing a business suit that looked as if it had been baked on him, like paint on a Bentley. He looked through Jane and, when the introduction was hastily made, extended his hand as an afterthought. It was a hard, dry hand, quickly withdrawn, the sort of hand that, when attached to the wrist of your loved one’s parent, is often a portent that you and your beloved are not going to spend your declining days watching the sun go down and reflecting on the happy years you have had together.
That was the last Jane ever saw of father Spaacks. Charlie was taken to Jane’s house, since she had more to offer in the way of amusement. Her collection of lead animals—her father’s from childhood—her picture books, and her colored pencils were far more intriguing than Cordy’s computer printouts, calculator, or the camera with zoom lens.
The love Jane bore for Cordy was at this point very hot. It pained her to see the flesh of his flesh and someone else’s flesh. She craved Charlie. She cut up his sandwiches for him and gave him his milk in a mug with a picture of a rabbit on it. When they went for walks, she was overcome with pleasure when Charlie took her hand or pulled on her coat to get her attention. She felt that she would someday like to be Charlie’s stepmother, which, she knew, was another way of expressing her hope that Cordy would be hers forever. Cordy had said that he would never marry again. Romance and marriage were mutually exclusive, he felt. Jane took this to be a reflection of the fact that he had never known any domestic happiness, and she was a domestic genius.
For months they were extremely happy. Love, in its initial stages, takes care of everything. Love transforms a difficult person into a charming eccentric; points of contention into charming divergences. It doesn’t matter that popular songs are full of warning—songs like “Danger, Heartbreak Dead Ahead” are written and sung for those who have no intention of doing anything but dancing to them. And while lovers do almost nothing but reveal themselves, who notices?
But as time went on it occurred to Jane that there was something odd about what she now saw was Cordy’s cheapness. The coldness that emanated from his parents’ Manhattan apartment, the lifeless, life-denying sitting room, the glacial hand of his father, seemed to hover around Cordy. His raptures about the way she lived began to make Jane feel like a hothouse orchid—pretty, expensive, and not long for this world. Cordy’s lavish coo of joy at the sight of two filets mignons, whose virtues in terms of cost and waste Jane found herself explaining, made her feel that what transpired between them did not resemble normal life to Cordy. Steam-table food, empty apartments, and family fights were normal to him, not lavender soap, being adored, and having his coffee brought to him in a big French cup.
One night he as much as stated his case. They stayed almost entirely at Jane’s apartment, since Cordy’s was not a fit place in which to conduct anything resembling a romance. He had had one bed pillow. The thought that Jane might someday sleep beside him had prompted him to go to a cut-rate bedding store and buy another, whose lumpy filling he could not identify. He admitted, however, what any sensible person will admit: that barring allergies, a good night’s rest is aided greatly by European goose down.
Cordy had had his dinner. He repaired to the couch, commandeered all the needlepoint cushions, pulled Jane near, and, with his nose pressed against her fragrant neck, announced that she was too rich for his blood.
“I live on my salary,” said Jane.
“I think I ought to go to a detoxification clinic,” said Cordy.
A shiver ran through Jane. Was living well a kind of poison? “You live in a needlessly horrible way,” she said.
“I live simply,” said Cordy. “It’s very dangerous to become used to luxury.”
“You seem to enjoy things,” Jane said. “For example, my things. You don’t mind drinking good coffee and getting wrapped up in a quilt to take a nap. You have a mania for deprivation. Besides, you don’t notice any million-dollar cameras with zoom lenses around here, do you?”
“I don’t use my camera,” Cordy said.
“That’s because you’re too cheap to buy film. It doesn’t matter whether or not you use it. You own it.”
“That’s not the point,” said Cordy. “The point is that things give you a false sense of life. If you have a nice house, you begin to think that life is nice.”
Jane said: “Isn’t it?”
“Not for long,” said Cordy.
Shortly after this interchange, Jane met Cordy’s mother. Mrs. Spaacks offered her son an electric frying pan. She discovered that she had two. If Cordy did not want one, she intended to sell it to a secondhand shop. Cordy and Jane drove two hours to the Salt Harbor house to get this implement, which Jane suspected Cordy would never use.
The house containing this extra frying pan was built on prime land overlooking the water. The setting into which it intruded was spectacular. The house itself was rather ugly and was furnished in that stiff, unsittable wicker that leaves deep red grooves in the flesh. It occurred to Jane that she had now seen two of the Spaackses’ domestic settings and had yet to spot any surface on which a human being might comfortably rest.
Cordy found his mother sitting in a wrought-iron chair, doing a Double-Crostic in the weak sunlight. She was wearing a suit that held her body like a straitjacket, and when she stood, she had the sort of carriage taught to girls who know that they will never in their lives have to bend over to pick up so much as a pin. She did not kiss her son. She merely lifted her head toward him, as if to warm up the air near his cheek. She gave Jane the benefit of a look, shook her hand, and turned to Cordy, whom she then led away, leaving Jane alone to ponder the landscape. Cordy was back shortly, carrying the electric frying pan. Soon he and Jane were in the car, on their way to Furnall, half an hour’s drive away, so Jane could see where Cordy had spent his childhood.
The house in Furnall was huge and cold. Everything was covered with slipcovers.
“It’s being sold,” Cordy explained. “That’s why it looks like this. Of course, it’s always looked something like this.”
Jane was given a guided tour. Cordy turned a corner and identified a room containing a table, a typewriter, and a wood file cabinet as the bedroom he had slept in as a child.
“When I went to college, they turned it into a room to store their tax returns in,” Cordy said.
He looked tired and seemed sad to Jane. She wanted to take him into her arms and comfort him. She wanted to wrap him up in all the nice things she had had as a child and compensate for what she imagined was the coldness of his childhood, his horrid parents, the fact that they had snatched his room away from him as soon as he had left home.
“What was it like to live here?” she asked.
“I can’t remember,” Cordy said.
Trouble in love seeks a proper issue. In some cases it is sex; in others, politics or money. In the case of Cordy, it was work. The time he spent with Jane, he said, was taking him away from his work. She was too seductive—too fragrant, too luxurious. He had changed his entire life to be with her, he said.
Jane, on the other hand, had gone on living as she had always done. Before Cordy came along, she had prepared dinners for herself, lolled around on Saturday mornings drinking coffee and reading the paper, just as she did with Cordy. She had worked on her thesis without Cordy, and she worked as well with him.
He said as he sat at the table, pouring cream over the strawberries: “All this life is getting in the way of life.”
Jane felt as if she had been slapped. She recalled the first conversation they had ever had. She had never thought her appetites were at all voracious—they were the normal appetites everyone had for pleasure in life. That first interchange made it clear that Cordy did not feel this way at all.
For a few weeks nothing much changed except that Jane began to feel embarrassed by her salads, by the dish of pears she kept on the coffee table. The attention Cordy lavished on the details of her life was beginning to make her feel not singled out and appreciated but freakish. They soon began to quarrel. The brilliance of their initial affection began to mire down in fights about meeting places, time spent together, and the cost of lamb chops. In the beginning, these quarrels were repaired quite simply. After all, they had started off magnificently. A glowing smile, a declaration, a kiss on the back of the neck could still bring them back to their original state in which they had felt that no other lovers had had the advantages of their fine minds, their attractiveness, the intelligence with which they adored one another. Now it seemed that there was rather more quarreling than enchantment. Cordy began to display a cold, bitter side. Jane, in turn, became businesslike and brisk.
It was soon decided that they should spend several nights apart. This was Jane’s idea, prompted by a sincere worry that Cordy should be working on his thesis and a great desire not to watch her brilliant love affair look more and more like a second-rate domestic failure.
Cordy went back to his Spartan diggings, where, with the aid of instant coffee and powdered milk, he began to work on his dissertation. When lovers agree to part, doom is right around the corner. Cordy and Jane were no exception. When they were together, they found themselves constantly misunderstanding one another, and when they were apart, the misunderstandings were further annotated by late-night telephone calls. It sometimes seemed to Jane that these disagreements were manufactured by Cordy, as if to rub her nose into his reality and show her that life was not, in fact, nice for very long.
Can the cut-rate lie down with the dearly purchased?
On these solitary nights Jane entertained thoughts of throwing out every endearing object she possessed; of pouring the dread olive oil down the sink. It was hard for her to believe that what had begun so happily and with such promise was ending in such a small-time way. She remembered that she had once felt that she and Cordy were protected by a magic mantle against the petty-mindedness that creeps into the relationships of others. After all, didn’t people stare at them in the street? Didn’t their colleagues look upon them with longing in their eyes? Weren’t they beautiful, brilliant, special?
It occurred to Jane that this terrible pass they had come to could easily be explained in terms of interior decoration. Can the cut-rate lie down with the dearly purchased? It was clear that it was all over. Her greatest attributes were now her deficits. They had passed some point of no return—somewhere where discount pillows and imported strawberry jam cannot meet.
Their last encounter took place in a coffee shop. They had decided to meet on neutral ground. The table between them was crowded with empty coffee cups and full ashtrays. By this time they had been mostly apart, except for telephone calls. Nothing seemed to work between them anymore, although the looks they exchanged across that squalid table were of pure longing. The fact was they adored each other. How they could feel that way when they were unable to find anything over which not to quarrel mystified them both. But there was no way around it. They adored one another, and it made no difference at all.
Cordy said: “I miss you so.”
Jane said: “What is it you miss? You miss someone who spends too much time in the bathtub, who reads for pleasure, which you think is some sort of crime, who spends too much money on food and who encourages you not to buy your ties in the drugstore. You no longer seem to approve of anything I do. How can you miss me?”
“I just miss you,” Cordy said.
“But I get in your way,” said Jane. “You said I was a luxury you couldn’t afford. I told you I pay my own way, but you meant that I waste your time. You think living a nice life is frivolous.”
“I adore you,” said Cordy.
Jane put her head down so as not to weep in public. She adored him, too. She adored someone who had begun to carp at her every gesture, who made her so self-conscious she could hardly get dressed in the morning.
“How can you adore me when we can no longer be together for five minutes without fighting?” she said.
“How long we can be together without fighting has nothing to do with adoration,” said Cordy.
Jane’s tears ceased. She was amazed that the matter could be so easily put. She remembered the incident of the lavender soap and his heartfelt confession that no one had ever given him a present. What all this meant was that in Cordy’s case, actual deprivation and the feeling of deprivation were one and the same. To feel that you have never been given a present is almost as good as having been neglected. Cordy thrived on this form of loss. He had twenty times the money she would ever have, yet not a day went by that he did not strive to find some novel way of cheating himself out of something. She had watched him window-shop, yearn for an item easily within his reach, and turn away. It was hopeless.
To feel that you have never been given a present is almost as good as having been neglected.
She took a deep breath and told Cordy that he would be doing her a real service if he simply got up and left. He sat for a moment, gave her the benefits of his most beautiful and tortured gaze, and then walked out the door.
When he hit the street, tears started down Jane’s cheeks. She ordered another cup of coffee, drank it slowly, dried her eyes, and watched a parade of students walking up the street. It was a hot spring day. Everyone was coatless. A few were shoeless. Couples strolled arm in arm.
And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cordy leaning against a car across the street, watching her. She realized how easy it would be to fling some money onto the table, race out the door, and dash across the street to him. She could feel his arms around her.
Instead she watched him back. It all made sense. He was now depriving himself of her. She thought sadly that he was like a cheapskate who loved flowers, who walked around with spare change in his pocket, prowling around flower stalls to get a free whiff of roses and carnations but never buying any.
Such a man might stand for hours outside a florist’s window looking at a gardenia that could quite easily be his. But why, he might ask himself, would a man want a gardenia and what would he do with it once he had it? A man like that might get very close to the florist’s door, and might even go inside, just to look around. He might ask the clerk the price of a gardenia and know that he could buy seven of them. That gardenia would be waiting to be bought, but not by him—not if there were no practical reason for such a gesture, and especially since it would be so much more fulfilling not to.
By the time Joan finds herself dining with a married man in New York City, she is weary of the world, wary of men, and has already experienced a lifetime of trauma. But it is only when another married man walks up to her table, pulls out a gun, and shoots himself, that Joan feels the urge to run from everything familiar and forge a new path for herself. Wearing her dead mother’s dress, with her parents’ ashes in the car, Joan makes her way across the country to California. There, she searches for a woman named Alice, whom she believes might allow her to better understand her past, and takes up residence in a rundown property shared with three other men.
The landscape of Animal, Lisa Taddeo’s debut novel, is brutal. Lecherous men tell repulsive stories; coyotes sniff out women’s menstrual blood and howl; children survive horrific acts of abuse; men’s eyes linger too long; and women are rendered as prey or predators. The book brims with sex and violence, two urges that Joan is familiar with. As a child, her mother taught her that “we are all monsters, we are all capable of monstrosity.”
Taddeo, in her propulsive narrative, builds on her exploration of women’s desire from her debut, bestselling nonfiction book, Three Women, and also seeks to understand how women’s rage builds and builds until it reaches a breaking point. Over Zoom, Taddeo and I spoke about depravity, blunt prose, animalhood, perceptions of motherhood, the male gaze, and the mechanisms behind reprehensible choices.
Jacqueline Alnes: In an interview about your first book, Three Women, you expressed that you were “interested in the complexity of female desire, which… have a lot more prismatic and complex feelings attached.” Animal, in many ways, is about desire. What did you learn from writing Joan?
Lisa Taddeo: I don’t think many readers are comfortable with the idea of a suicidal mother in literature or even just one who abandons the kids in any kind of way. It’s not a moral thing, it’s just they don’t want to read about it. I was interested in showing a character like Joan who, while that’s not necessarily her deal in the book, does make these reprehensible choices. I wanted to look at how someone gets to a dark place.
I always think about the astronaut Lisa Nowak, who found out her husband was cheating on her with another woman, so she drove across the country with all these tools in the back of her car in order to kill them. And she wore a diaper the whole way.
JA: I remember that.
LT: At first blush, that story seems insane, but I think that having that sort of pain and sudden rage is a real thing. Wearing a diaper because you do not want to stop to pee, where does that come from? Exploring the way she got to that moment is interesting to me. It’s not about condoning or not condoning her behavior, it’s more of a scientific experiment.
JA: Joan calls herself “depraved” repeatedly throughout the book, and many of her applications of the term seem gendered. What was it like to play with language like “depraved,” “whore,” and “slut”?
LT: When Joan speaks about herself in the negative, I wanted it to come across as someone who is so fully aware of the nomenclature out there that she owns it before anyone else can use it. I think it’s something female comedians do. They make fun of themselves and they do it so that other people don’t do it to them first. Joan knows people are going to call her this, this, and this, so she says I am this, this, and this, based on the definition according to society or according to the dictionary. She says it almost with a tongue-in-cheek, like words have no meaning. There’s a disavowal for her of having any false front or facade.
JA: That’s interesting because the way she actually approaches sex is so surface level. She often performs sex rather than allowing herself to participate. There is just once in the book when she acts for her own pleasure. What was it like to explore the ways in which women are expected to be sexual beings but not enjoy sex in any fulfilling way?
I don’t think many readers are comfortable with the idea of a suicidal mother in literature or even just one who abandons the kids in any kind of way.
LT: I think it’s blessedly changing a lot, which is something I’ve seen in younger friends of mine and nieces and stuff like that. It has so much to do with what we watch and read when we’re young. My daughter, for example, she’s six, was watching The Little Mermaid and then Peter Pan and all of these stories were ones I didn’t want her to watch any more. I was like, why does Peter Pan get to decide between Tinker Bell and Tiger Lily and Wendy? Why are these three really cool chicks waiting around for this annoying man-boy?
The notion of a man choosing a woman still exists, and it’s societally ingrained. The gendered terminology we have for people and who gets to do the choosing, Joan has an awareness of that. I wanted for her wisdom to lie in that very deep-rooted understanding of where we are in society still.
JA: The title Animal works in so many ways. There are parallels between the actual animals in the book (like the coyotes who smell women’s periods coming) and the men, who sniff out women as prey. What’s the relationship between violence and sex? Or violence and desire?
LT: I think that they exist on parallel planes, but also cross. We have so much violence in sex in our collective history as human beings, that it’s there a lot, but I don’t think they are inextricably linked in any way for everyone.
JA: In the book, they feel linked, only because so much of it is bloody in my mind. So much of it feels traumatic. Even the fact that Joan always goes to eat raw meat after she has sex. There’s something visceral about it. It made me think about how much we are still animals, if that makes sense.
LT: We go through phases of animalhood and non-animalhood, as a culture. We have to go around denying the animal self all day to live in polite, normal society. It’s interesting to witness when kids just do exactly whatever they want, to just see people without that sense of awareness. Women, specifically, are not allowed to be considered animals in the same way that perhaps a man would.
JA: There seems to be an appetite that men are allowed whereas women are viewed as prey.
Joan experiences a series of traumas, but a recurring one is that she feels violated by mens’ touch and gazes. At one point, when she finds a man staring at her, she says that “there are a hundred such small rapes a day.” What, in your mind, is the effect of these repeated violences?
LT: It adds up until one day, you may invariably explode. When you look at men who are put upon in certain ways, it’s not as gendered in some ways. For women, the sort of violences and gazes we have received from men is such a thing that it can trigger so much because it happens so often, in the same kind of way because of the animal aspect of it.
This might be too much information, but this morning a guy came to check the well or something and I didn’t know he was coming. I was working at home, wearing these thin pajamas, and when I opened the door my nipples were just totally there. I was so aware of them and he was staring at them. I wrote a bit about that in Animal and then it happened to me and I was like, did I write this into happening? It was such a weird feeling. It wasn’t his fault, they were just so out there that you couldn’t look away. It was 10 a.m.
We have to go around denying the animal self all day to live in polite, normal society.
That moment stayed with me. It’s happened to me so many times, but this time felt different because I’m a mom, and I’m wearing my really ugly pajamas. The nipple aspect was almost like it’s own private horror. I’ve had that feeling so many times where you close a door and you’re like, someone just looked at my nipples. And it’s like, why do you care? But there are so many implications behind that.
Partly, with Joan, one of the reasons she is so open in that aspect, is that if you allow yourself to hold all the experiences you have had to that end, it starts to form a picture that really stays with you. Then, one day when someone does one little thing, all of those things come together like a mosaic.
JA: And the weight of it. I used to live in Oklahoma, and when I would go running people would honk or yell lewd things from their cars, so I developed this habit of flipping everyone off and running as hard as I could for a while after. There was this rage that I felt. I remember one time a friend told me she had honked and her kids were in the car and I was like, sorry. I couldn’t distinguish between a threat and just a car, and that rage I felt just lives in my body now. No matter the person behind the wheel, no matter the intent, it’s the idea of someone breaking that power I think I have in the world when I’m out running on my own and reminding me that I don’t.
LT: Exactly.
JA: Have you read Melissa Febos’s recent essay “I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I didn’t Want”?
LT: I have it bookmarked, I’m excited to.
JA: She reflects that women tend to consent to touch, even if unwanted, because “the need to protect our bodies from the violent retaliation of men and the need to protect the same men from the consequences of their own behavior, usually by displacing the responsibility onto ourselves.” It rang so true, and resonated for me so much with the ways Joan has to maneuver as a woman through the world. That unwanted touch builds and builds into rage. What was it like writing that escalation?
LT: I was writing it simultaneously with the story that Lenny, the older man, is telling her. I think a lot of us have had the experience of a man mansplaining and wanting you to hold onto that story—kind of like that line you just read from Febos—they want you to tell them it’s okay. I think the idea of Joan having heard all of these things, all of her life, from men, and someone is asking her to forgive all of the sins in his life, it reminds her of all the other men who have asked her to do the same.
And so finally, she just says no. That felt organic to me.
JA: Joan has such a hard time making relationships with women, but Joan sort of becomes friends with Alice. Joan is always taking note of how Alice is younger, better, prettier.
For women, the sort of violences and gazes we have received from men is such a thing that it can trigger so much because it happens so often.
LT: What I always find interesting is that whenever I’ve written a male character in a book or a show who is incredibly perfect and the varsity whatever and hot, male readers often talk about how those types of men don’t exist. They get really angry at the notion of this perfect guy who is young, hot, well-read, insert whatever descriptor you want here. But with women, you can create this perfect female character and nobody balks at it. They’re like, “Oh yeah, the hot girl. That’s what we should have.” What’s important to me about Alice is that she is that perfect girl. She is Joan’s foil in that sense. Besides what Alice means to Joan in the actual context of the story, she is just another man in a sense. Not a man, exactly, but she is someone that Joan cannot know.
JA: I feel like part of the reason Joan’s relationship with women is so complicated is because of her thorny relationship with her mother. What about mother relationships interest you?
LT: That’s sort of the biggest part that I held over from Three Women. I heard much from women about their mothers and about how their mothers’ actions translated into their own present. Having lost my mom before I got to have certain conversations, I don’t get to get a lot of things from her. I am very interested in that aspect of my own loss and pain. I like exploring that in fiction and talking to people about their relationship with their moms. I find it infinitely interesting.
JA: There are so many things too that you might not realize are passed down until you start to learn these almost secret histories that your mother led. For Joan, she starts to recognize that her mother was one way with her, but that she also was dealing with pressures from her husband, from society, and of who she thought she needed to be as a mother.
I’m interested in the idea of mothering too in how Joan might have had to mother herself or how culturally, women are often expected to want to mother others.
LT: I will say, I’m not that interested in women needing to be mothers to others. We don’t all have mothering tendencies. I don’t know that I’m someone who thinks of myself as having mothering tendencies, but there is such a judgment and definition around what it means to be a good mother. The very fact that we can shame people for not breastfeeding is an example. Having those conversations about motherhood makes it such a fraught topic. I’m more interested in the idea of women who don’t feel the need to mother.
JA: Women are expected to have that desire and if you don’t, you get told that you’re going to change, you’re young. Men don’t get that as much. They aren’t asked why they don’t want to be a father or told that they are nurturing enough to be a father. There are other forms of care.
Edgar Allan Poe is generally regarded as the OG of American literature. OG, of course, stands for “Original Goth.” When it comes to the creepy, the weird, and the macabre, Poe takes his place as the grandmaster of the whole black parade. Guillermo del Toro, serving as the series editor of the Penguin Horror line, writes: “It is in Poe that we first find the sketches of modern horror while being able to enjoy the traditional trappings of the Gothic tale. He speaks of plagues and castles and ancient curses, but he is also morbidly attracted to the aberrant intellect, the mind of the outsider.” Del Toro locates Poe as the American conduit for European strains of Gothicism and romanticism, letting loose the fears of the Old World upon the New.
But viewing the emergence of the American Gothic as a transatlantic phenomenon misses more homegrown explorations into the bizarre. A century before H.P. Lovecraft (inspired by Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables) depicted New England as a realm of terror and dread, Nathaniel Hawthorne was on the case, mining the region’s history for insights into the mind’s darker corners. Chiefly remembered today for The Scarlet Letter, that bane of high school curricula, Hawthorne’s highest achievements are actually found in his short stories. There, he examines the supposed innocence of the early American character, finding the darkness that lies beneath.
At roughly the same time that Poe was publishing stories in magazines and periodicals, Hawthorne did the same. (The House of the Seven Gables is unmistakably Gothic, but it was published after Poe established himself as the face of the genre.) Indeed, Poe himself took notice of Hawthorne’s talents. In a review, Poe wrote that “Mr. Hawthorne’s distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination originality—a trait which, in the literature of fiction, is positively worth all the rest.” Many of Hawthorne’s finest stories were collected in Twice-Told Tales(1837), the first book he published under his own name. (He published an earlier novel, Fanshawe, under a pseudonym, like a 21st century writer self-pubbing an e-book.) As with The Scarlet Letter, many of his stories depict the early Puritan colonies of New England, well before the United States was established as a country. You can see why. Hawthorne was the descendant of New England Puritans, including his great-great-grandfather, John, who served as a judge of the infamous Salem witch trials. Hawthorne’s familial guilt over being involved in such a grotesque undertaking colors much of his work.
Hawthorne’s tales focus on communities, and the destruction that secrets can visit upon them.
Unlike Poe, whose stories often feature lonesome individuals questing into the unknown, Hawthorne’s tales focus on communities, and the destruction that secrets can visit upon them. Emblematic of this approach is “The Minister’s Black Veil.” The story takes place in a New England village during the early 17th century. Reverend Hooper, leader of the local church, arrives at the building one Sunday morning. Hooper has never been very distinctive as a minister. He acquits his duties quietly, without drawing attention to himself. But one day, without announcement or explanation, he draws an inordinate amount of attention. He arrives at church wearing a black veil over his face. The same kind of veil a mourning widow would wear.
Why does Hooper wear the veil? He refuses to say. But the parishioners note a change in his personality. Before, his sermons were perfunctory, even dull. But once he wears the veil, his sermonizing becomes a full-throated performance, one that enraptures the congregation. But rumors continue to roil the community. Does Hooper feel guilty about some secret sin? Is that why he wears the veil? If so, then he should simply confess the sin, and return to his normal, unveiled self. But Hooper refuses. He gives no explanation as to the nature of the veil, not even to his wife. He keeps the veil on for the rest of his life. When he dies, none dare remove it, and he is laid in the ground with his face still veiled.
The black veil is a perfect Gothic detail. A symbol of mourning, and a feminine one at that, worn by the male minister to the confoundment of the community. No explanation is given, neither by Hooper nor the narrator, which allows the veil’s meaning to grow, resonating in different settings. Perhaps Hooper is simply reminding his parishioners of the death that awaits them all, and the veil is his way of making peace with it. Or maybe the veil represents Hooper’s depression, one that he cannot otherwise express in his pious community. You could even say that Hooper, in donning the feminine accoutrements of death, is expressing ambivalence about his own gender. Perhaps the black veil is a kind of gothic drag performance, the only one available to Hooper in 18th-century New England. Hooper, after all, fully comes to life once he covers his face with the black lace, expressing aspects of himself that were previously—forgive the pun—veiled.
“Young Goodman Brown,” like The Scarlet Letter, takes place in a Puritan community in the late 17th century, around the time of the historical Salem witch trials. But rather than a whole community ostracizing a lone individual, this story finds the title character doubting the very nature of his community, and consequently growing distant from it. One evening, Goodman Brown is taking a stroll in the New England woods. There he meets a mysterious gentleman. The gentleman leads him to a clearing, where, through the trees, Brown sees the leaping flames of a great fire. It is a witches’ Sabbath—the original Satanic panic. But gathered there are not just a few outcasts hexing the townsfolk. Brown’s whole community chants before the flames, including his beloved wife Faith. Just as Faith is about to drink from an accursed cup, Brown cries out. He finds himself in an empty wood, with no fire roaring. Was the witches’ Sabbath a dream? That question goes unanswered. But the damage has been done. After beholding such an infernal vision, Brown can no longer trust his neighbors. He even grows distant from his wife, and eventually dies a lonesome death, estranged from communal bonds.
‘Young Goodman Brown’ is among the first instances of a trope that has since become a mainstay of American narrative art: the idyllic community with a seedy underbelly.
“Young Goodman Brown” is among the first instances of a trope that has since become a mainstay of American narrative art, from literature to film: the idyllic community with a seedy underbelly. All across the country are quaint, pleasant towns, with tidy houses and gazebos. But such quaintness is a mask. Within the houses, beneath the surface, roil dark passions and secret sins. In its European form, gothic stories often locate the source of infectious darkness in the decadent aristocracy, from Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic to the literally infectious Dracula of Bram Stoker fame. The early United States, lacking such patrilineal aristocracy, often believed itself immune to contagions. But Hawthorne, working against such naivete, finds the darkness within the community itself. The quaint small town is not besieged from without by social or supernatural forces; it is infected from within, by nothing more monstrous than the human heart.
You can trace a direct line from Hawthorne’s insight to the present day. Perhaps the greatest explorer of the darkness beneath American shininess presently working is David Lynch. A Boomer who grew up in the 1950s, in suburbs as pristine as Salem, Lynch peers below the perfectly manicured lawns to find the horror writhing there. Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont, as played by Kyle MacLachlan, is a Goodman Brown of the 1980s. Visiting his hometown of Lumberton during a break from college, Jeffrey finds himself enmeshed in a web of crime, sex and murder. Twin Peaks, where Laura Palmer is murdered after getting trapped in local sordidness and cosmic struggle, resembles a retelling of “Young Goodman Brown” in which Faith, Brown’s wife, is the main character. She confronts the darkness of her hometown and, unlike the menfolk, endures it, coming out stronger in the end.
“The Birthmark” is one of Hawthorne’s most affecting stories. Its power flows from Hawthorne’s facility at depicting Gothic darkness infecting one of the most intimate communal bonds of all: love. Love shades into possession, as it often does in Gothic tales, but not as a result of outright malevolence. There is no mustache-twirling villain to be found in the story. Instead we have a man who believes he knows everything, only to lose it all.
Gothic and Romantic writers of Hawthorne’s time often depicted science as a malevolent force that sought to drain the mystery from existence. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the most famous example, of course. “The Birthmark” takes the basic dynamic of Frankenstein, that of creator and creation, and places it in an affecting, deeply personal sphere.
Hawthorne’s contribution to the Gothic mode, right when it was forming, consists of creating believable, even mundane settings for horror to wreak havoc.
Aylmer is a scientist who has mastered every branch of knowledge. His wife, Georgiana, is a beautiful young woman, the love of his life. But her beauty is marred by one imperfection: a birthmark on her left cheek, as if “a fairy at her birth hour had laid her hand upon the tiny infant’s cheek.” Aylmer becomes obsessed with correcting the imperfection. He devotes all his learning to that end. He devises a procedure for removing Georgiana’s birthmark. He succeeds, at which point Georgiana immediately dies.
An obvious ending? A better description would be “inevitable.” “The Birthmark” is a gothic fairy tale, and part of the appeal of fairy tales lies in knowing how they’ll end before they even start. Think of Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” which has a strong affinity with “The Birthmark.” What makes the story so affecting is that the reader knows that, as soon as the husband removes the ribbon from the wife’s neck, her life will end. You read the story with your hands covering your eyes, peering through fingers. It is the same with “The Birthmark.” You turn the pages of the story as slowly as you can, prolonging the inevitable for as long as possible.
Hawthorne’s contribution to the Gothic mode, right when it was forming, consists of creating believable, even mundane settings for horror to wreak havoc. Quaint communities, pleasant churches. Simple backgrounds that offset the bizarre, making it pop. The approach makes him something of a minimalist, which is ironic, since Gothicism is all about excess and spilling over artificial boundaries. But it was highly effective, enabling him to create moods of dread and wonder with just a few flourishes. Read today, his work seems eerily prescient when it comes to the fears that still trouble American communities, innocent or—more likely—not.
Now that the finale has aired and the dust has settled around the body of Erin McMenamin, maybe you’ve found yourself missing Mare Sheehan. She’s the perfect antihero: a mixture of the classic hard-boiled detective, whose past wounds drive the fervor of a present investigation, and the girl detective, a beloved figure whose wit and perceptive powers help her uncover a close-knit community’s secrets. Combine that with the suffocating atmosphere of a small town, and you’ve got a gripping story.
Fortunately, plenty of novels use the same formula to create compelling characters and captivating plots. If you’re dying to see more like Mare, check out these books, featuring locales as small as Easttown and female detectives as savvy and as sarcastic as your favorite Pennsylvania D.I.
Set at Oxford in the fictional women’s college of Shrewsbury, Dorothy Sayers’s 1935 classic revolves around Harriet Vane, a detective novelist investigating a series of threatening letters, vandalisms, and violent attacks at her alma mater. Harriet also happens to be on the receiving end of the culprit’s acrimony. Along with her admirer, detective Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet must discover the criminal before it’s too late for her.
In the titular novella from this stunning story collection, Cassie, a young Black woman, works in a government agency responsible for fixing historical inaccuracies. Cassie and her rival are assigned to investigate a small Wisconsin town grappling with a racist crime in its past. But the victim of the purported murder might still be alive. Cassie teams up with her nemesis to find the truth and to confront the ways we manipulate our own stories for personal gain.
Detective Cassie Maddox of the Dublin Murder Squad has had a rough go of it. Her last investigation brought her into conflict with a psychopath, leaving her with stab wounds and forcing her to quit the murder beat. But when a woman who looks eerily identical to Cassie turns up dead, her old boss talks her into a dangerous plan: Cassie will go undercover in the victim’s place to tempt the killer out of hiding. As Cassie gets drawn into the life her double left behind, she loses track of the boundaries between her real and undercover identities.
Anne Beddingfeld, an orphan, moves to London in search of adventure. She stumbles upon one when she witnesses a suspicious death at a tube station and finds a cryptic note near the body. In search of the truth, Anne books passage on a cruise ship mentioned in the dead man’s note, where she befriends suspects and is attacked in turn. Peril follows Anne on her journey—will she catch the killer in time, or become yet another victim? At once a satire and a stellar example of its genre, The Man in the Brown Suit is funny, frightening, and self-aware.
In a remote Polish village, aging spinster Janina Duszejko spends most of her time translating the poetry of William Blake and studying the stars. The townspeople largely dismiss her as a crackpot. But Janina inserts herself into the investigation when the villagers discover that her neighbor, a hunter nicknamed Big Foot, has died. As more bodies are found in increasingly odd circumstances, Janina insists she knows who the culprit is. Too bad no one will listen to her.
In the tiny town of Keldale, Yorkshire, a resident claims to have murdered her father. Indeed, she was found seated beside his headless corpse, dressed in her finest gown and holding an axe. But Keldale is home to a host of secrets, and nothing there is what it seems. When Scotland Yard inspectors Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers visit the tranquil Yorkshire valley to find the true killer, they uncover a shattering series of crimes that threaten to upend Keldale completely.
Claire DeWitt is the world’s greatest detective—or at least, so she says. She returns to New Orleans, where she apprenticed, to investigate the disappearance of a prominent DA after Hurricane Katrina. Though her tactics are a bit esoteric, Claire is unwavering in her pursuit of the case. Her search brings her into contact with gangs of feral children, drug-abusing goons, and other missing figures from her past. Claire drags readers into the dark underbelly of New Orleans as she attempts to make order out of all the chaos.
Detective Marti MacAlister has been tasked with a seemingly unsolvable case: all that’s left of the murder victim is an unidentifiable arm. Marti and her partner delve into the exclusive artistic community of Lincoln Prairie, Illinois to tackle the mystery. Meanwhile, Marti’s best friend is embroiled in a dangerous journey of her own as a suitor spirits her away to the Bahamas. As the case in Lincoln Prairie starts to crack, Marti must also rescue her friend in this dramatic whirlwind of a novel.
For many people living marginalized lives, the monstrous is only a step away at any time. That man walking down the street —a neighbor or an assailant? The person in your workspace or classroom—are they about to turn on you, show how they’ve always felt? A crime happens—will the police fix it, or, more likely, make you a victim all over again? The monstrous is always a brief turn, a simple what-if, away.
It doesn’t surprise, then, that many minority writers take on the monstrous in their works of fiction. In my own book, Transmutation, I took a look at the original colonialist underpinnings of the Gothic genre (vampires, for example, could more accurately be described as “outsiders” to the dominant ways of living), and examined the idea of reclamation. What if the tables were turned? What if the monsters were not those society considered odd or “outside,” but the ones who put them there?
The following authors, all from backgrounds that might be considered marginalized, took their own long looks at the monstrous. And what they came away with was brilliant, chilling, and some of the most exciting writing happening in fiction.
Gabino Iglesias’s linked short stories that take place on the borderlands between Mexico and America are full of violence, terror, and creatures (some of which slither out of the wombs of pregnant mothers in the night!). Starkly written with gorgeous line-to-line care, this book proves Gabino is a force in horror literature. The collection he edited in about a month’s time, Halldark Holidays, is further proof that if you want good politically-oriented, diverse gore and terror, Iglesias’s always going to be the one to look towards.
There’s not a much more terrifying subject than America’s still-unreckoned-with history of racism and violence towards Black Americans. Kunzru takes this subject and makes it even more terrifying by making a vengeful spirit of a Black American blues singer who was disappeared into a chain gang. Demonic possession, and turning the tables on white appropriation of Black culture make this horror novel a deeply political and timely one.
This novel starts with a bang—a young woman poisons her whole wealthy family at a wedding reception. The narrator, her sister, is in a coma, and from there unravels the dark history of the family that led to this act of monstrousness.
A truly sweet and thoughtful YA novel based on the premise of a family of witches who are cursed in such a way that the person each member falls in love with will die. This book has haunted phone calls, magical grandparents, and does the work of making us all rethink that which we take for granted we’ve been cursed with.
The runaway-star narrator of this multi-narrator book is the ghost of a young boy who died in Parchman Farm/Mississippi State Penitentiary. The history of racism in America lives strong in these pages, and monstrousness is something we come to question as something that might also be mercy.
A series of short stories that take place in Enriquez’s home country of Argentina, this collection has all the tropes of the Gothic writ large in its pages—crumbling mansions, that eerie house down the block where people disappear, and the grotesque. I swear, there is a scene with fingernails and teeth that you will never be able to forget.
A brilliant writer who swaggers through whatever genre they need, taking what creates politically vibrant and artistically vivid work, Rivers Solomon absolutely crushes this game in The Deep. Africans thrown overboard during the slave trade became underwater creatures, and one of them per generation must store all the memories they have jetisoned to survive.
I want to be whisked away to Arizona
and kissed in the depression of the Earth.
Surrounded by rocks that have heard the moans of creatures like me,
long necked
and ferocious
slow-stepping, and extraordinary.
Standing ankle-deep in oceans of sand
Under sun that refuses to give up
Sharing heat with someone that loves me,
that sees me as a beginning and the now,
their future and their lover from a past life
I want to love in Arizona.
I want my palms and shoulders and the back of my neck
bathed in sunlight and lips
To fall asleep in a city of cacti
and kept awake by all the life that romps in the night
I want to walk into the chilly desert draped under your arm,
blanketed by all of you and all of the stars
that seem more like ancestors,
winking and beaming down at us,
granting me the wish that has lived in my skeleton since my conception:
to be loved unconditionally
a freedom they’ve prayed over me endlessly.
I want the stars and the moon
and the lizards and the dirt
and the fingers and their touch
and the promise of forever,
in Arizona.
The Spare
I can be a masochist
a narcissist.
An irrationalist,
when I’m angry.
a catastrophist
when I’m afraid.
a demolitionist
when I’m happy,
an extremist with my angst.
I often look into the mirror
And I hope
(pray)
for reflections of grandeur
for a version of myself that will never exist
comparison is my vice
my lightning thief
my jealousy thunderous and violent
and loud enough to rattle the windows of my skull
but repressed enough to never be seen in my eyes
as I stare up at the sun
and make a silent wish up on that star
to melt the snowy scalps of the peaks,
to obliterate the earth.
to match my energy in an act of passion
because how can I ever compete
with these girls
who have only ever known
power
raised around mountains while I have only ever known
caution
raised in the fist
of a small town
with no wonder
no freedom
only empty playgrounds
and a wide, mocking sky
I am the antagonist.
The terrorist of my own body
who feels bile climb up her throat with hungry fingers
when I begin to feel like myself
when I begin to believe in the mythology of me
I beat myself back down into fallacy
and act as ventriloquist
To be the girl I think you want
to be an illusion you fall for
if only for a fleeting second.
because I am not rainbow
I am not mountain
I am not Colorado sunset
but a snow squall
a gaping chasm
the insatiable, colorless gloaming.
And I hope
(pray)
for your ability to thrive
through a dark and stormy night
with your high beams on
and a love for the drive
Our relationships with our brothers and sisters are simultaneously history and fiction—in other words, this happened (more or less), and it’s quite a story. Sometimes it’s just a little story, secrets and confidences that are more mundane than epic: “We are the only ones who remember what the house felt like on Sunday mornings. We are the only ones who really know why Mom and Aunt Ruth don’t speak.”
In my new novelDarling at the Campsite, 30-something Rowan is adjusting to the sudden death of his estranged brother. On his best days, Rowan feels lost. But now that his only sibling—that older, wiser kid with whom he once shared a house, a love of Talking Heads, and a common foil (i.e. their mother)—is gone, Rowan feels even more adrift. It hardly matters that the pair hadn’t been close in recent years, because that’s not what siblinghood is about.
Siblinghood is about being there from the beginning. Our brothers and sisters saw us in our unformed state, before we became the people we’d hoped to be (or, let’s be honest, the people we hoped we’d never be). They’re always onto us, the only people over whose eyes we can’t pull the wool.
Novels that center on sibling dynamics have always beckoned to me. I’m drawn in by the insularity, the inside jokes so old and entrenched they’re acknowledged with a shared smile instead of yet another retelling. These books contain discoveries, or perhaps an acceptance of the fact that there will be no discovery, that there is a truth out there that will forever remain elusive. Sometimes it’s just the recognition of having a shared place in the world, a story that is ours and ours alone.
This sprawling novel follows four siblings as they move through life connected by a harrowing secret: as children, they snuck out of the house together to visit a fortune-teller who claimed to tell each of them the precise date of their death.
In Eggers’ debut memoir, 21-year-old Dave finds himself forced into the role of parent to his seven-year-old brother Toph when their mother and father both die of cancer a month apart. While Dave has to be guardian and protector to his much younger sibling, one gets the sense that Dave—barely north of childhood himself—understands that he serves Toph best when simply acting as his big brother.
Four siblings are bound by the humiliating fact that their parents are famous for having authored a Joy of Sex-type book. Worse, their parents appear all too identifiable in the book’s illustrations. How do you live with that? The premise is rich with comic potential, and there’s plenty of funny, but because it’s Wolitzer, every page lands with poignancy and wisdom.
Ten-year-old Abdullah watches helplessly as his father sells Pari—Abdullah’s beloved sister, only three-years-old—to a wealthy family. Forced to endure the painful separation from his sister, the rest of Abdullah’s life is shaped by this event. Following its characters through the decades in Afghanistan, France, and the United States, it’s a shattering novel about the consequences of brutal choices.
It’s rarely a compliment to say that a book feels longer than it is (That movie went on for days!), but Lucky Us is packed with so many vivid scenes and resonant characters that when it’s over, you wonder how Bloom got it all in under 300 pages. It’s the story of half-sisters, Eva and Iris, setting out into 1940s America and, as Bloom puts it, “moving forward only because backward wasn’t possible.”
The signature Tropper sarcasm abounds, but fundamentally, this book—which involves siblings coming together to mourn the death of their father —is about the healing that emerges organically from being together. Satisfyingly, the book does not aim to be profound, just real, and the interaction among the siblings, all in various states of disrepair, is just as relatable and rewarding as it is funny.
Annie and Buster Fang are not only the children of performance artists, but also reluctant participants in said performance art. Well into adulthood now, they are still trying to find their own way and their own semblance of equilibrium after a childhood sorely lacking in it. It’s madcap and zany, but there’s darkness at the edges as Annie and Buster bond over their need to escape the shadow of their upbringing.
Publishing is blindingly white—according to the most recent Lee & Low report on publishing diversity, 76% of the industry is white and only 5% of the industry is Black. Zakiya Dalila Harris knows this statistic intimately, she was one of the only Black employees in the editorial department of Knopf/Doubleday.
Her psychological thrillerThe Other Black Girl confronts the anti-Blackness of the publishing industry, but that examination of Blackness applies to any workplace. The novel follows 26-year-old Nella Rogers, one of the only Black employees at Wagner Books. Until Hazel, a Black woman from Harlem, is hired and starts working in the cubicle next to her. Nella is excited to bond with a fellow Black colleague and ready to make up for lost time. But when she starts getting mysterious notes on her desk that read “LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.”, she realizes that something ominous is lurking in the cubicles of Wagner.
The Other Black Girl takes the ordinary and makes it sinister to interrogate what it means to feel overlooked or threatened in the workplace.
I chatted with Harris about the value of Black labor, allyship, and how privilege plays a role in the risks we do or don’t take.
Arriel Vinson: I want to start by talking about the epigraph, “Black History is Black Horror.” Can you tell me more about this choice? I was really intrigued.
Zakiya Dalila Harris: Tananarive Due has an incredible documentary that came out right around the time I started writing—Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, about horror films from the 1890s to the present. I have always been a big horror fan. I love all of it. I grew up watching a lot of this stuff.
I was really excited to see a film that critically looked at Black people and their roles in horror throughout time. She touches on how, in some ways, The Creature from the Black Lagoon represented otherness, outsideness, and looks at that as a parallel to how Black people were treated at that time, but even now. It was so inspiring to me because again, being a Black person who loves horror, I happened to see myself in a lot of these movies.
I knew that with this book, pretty much from the beginning, there were going to be some genre elements. I knew Hazel was going to be something other.
AV: You worked as an editorial assistant. What empowered you to write such a critical look at the publishing industry? And did you receive any pushback as you were writing or shopping around?
ZDH: I worked at Knopf and I also worked at Doubleday. I was in a role that no other assistant was in really, because I assisted an editor who acquired for both Doubleday and Knopf, and then one who solely acquired for Knopf and Pantheon.
I started writing this at my desk after running into a Black woman I’d never seen before on my floor and having this moment of, “Oh my God, this is awesome”, but then also, “Wait, why isn’t she excited about seeing me?” We didn’t have any kind of interaction. Looking back, I don’t even know what we would have done. We were in the bathroom, so it was random. But as I went back to my desk, I was like, “Wow, I’m really starved for Black interaction”.
We take risks every day by being ourselves, by going to certain places.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of times our IT department had people of color, our wonderful mail people were people of color, people working at the front desk were people of color. But it’s not quite the same. There was one other Black person in editorial on my floor, but he was an older Black gentleman, so we both moved through very different worlds.
I was so taken by this interaction that I came up with the idea of two Black women in this white space. Publishing is what I knew, but I thought, “I’m going to change it from publishing at some point, because this might be too much.” But it’s so rich, the way we talk about books, bringing in authors. Those dynamics are nuanced and there are so many things every editorial assistant has to get through. They’re in this prime position to see every possible, wonderful thing about publishing but also everything that is not so wonderful, which of course is a lack of diversity. So I kept going.
I had one moment when I was querying, where an agent kind of surprised me—because I knew who they were and thought, “this person will think it’s necessary,”—and said, “I love this, but I think you should change the publishing element.” I had someone else tell me they didn’t love it. I had a few people say they didn’t love the genre elements. I remember someone telling me, “I’m not sure about it.” I cried. I sobbed for hours like, “No one is going to want this book. No one is going to take this because it is about publishing.”
Thankfully, that wasn’t the norm and a lot of publishing houses were really excited about it, including old coworkers of mine who had really enjoyed it and thought it was eye-opening.
AV: There’s a moment where Nella wonders if she should warn Hazel about how white Wagner is or how anti-Black Wagner is. You wrote this inner debate so well—feeling like we owe other Black people information, but also fearing if we tell them we’re risking our own positions. Why was the theme of risk-taking so important in The Other Black Girl?
ZDH: Nella is inherently not a risk-taker in so many ways. She is, in that she’s still at this publishing house, but even still, she’s kind of coasting. She’s into the diversity meetings [they have], she wants them to happen, but also doesn’t make a stink about it when they don’t. For her, a lot of that comes from her family. She remembers her dad’s anecdotes of working at that place and the moment in Burger King—and I’ve definitely heard similar stories from my family. We have to nod at one another when we are in a room together because who else is going to? We’re looking out for one another.
For Nella, in a way, that is not as much of a risk. She’s also been so starved for more Black friends and having someone at work would be wonderful. She thinks that because both her and Hazel have navigated these white worlds, they are similar in the fact that she’s like, “I would want to know.” Risk-taking is something that we have to do. We take risks every day by being ourselves, by going certain places.
Kendra Rae’s story is also about putting it all out there. Nella doesn’t know everything about Kendra Rae, but she would find solace in seeing this person before her speaking out. Maybe what Kendra Rae said could have been sugar-coated or maybe she could have said it differently, but she was able to speak out. I wanted to consider all the different ways that we are—quietly for Nella and not so quietly with Kendra Rae—trying to carve out spaces for ourselves and for one another.
AV: I noticed with both Nella and Hazel, and Kendra Rae and Diana, that the novel is exploring the value—or the lack thereof—in Black opinions. We’re looking at whether or not Kendra and Diana should be trusted to put out Burning Heart, Nella’s opinion about Needles and Pins for the editor she works under. What made you want to explore the value of Black work, both labor and writing itself?
I would feel so insecure about having been privileged, but also felt like, ‘I’m still a Black woman in America, the most disrespected woman.’
ZDH: When I first started writing, I had the theme of commodification of diversity in mind, but especially Black bodies and Black work. In general, in our society—as in capitalism—there are so many things that go into what we value and what holds more weight. Nella often struggles with the fact that she’s seen as the Black voice at Wagner, and that’s such a big weight that a lot of Black people who are in these spaces—who are able to get through these walls—have to carry around. It’s a lot of baggage. I don’t know what the answer is on how to navigate that—it’s case by case. We should use our power when we are in these spaces to speak up and do what we feel is right. But also we are human. We should be allowed to just be.
Also Black women aren’t really listened to, ever. That’s the other side of it with Kendra Rae and Diana. “No way white people would want to buy that book,” was most likely what most people at Wagner thought at first. And then it was like, “Oh, but you were right, you’re in Vogue now”. That’s something that we see all the time. As an artist, I also feel that pressure.
AV: The Other Black Girl also questions privilege. We see the privilege of the white employees at Wagner and the higher ups and how that differs, and even the difference of childhoods between Nella and Hazel. What made you zoom in on what privilege means for each type of character in the novel?
ZDH: Every single character has an element of me. Nella the most, of course. When I started writing Hazel, I asked myself, “Who is the cool Black chick that I wish I could be?” Sometimes I wish I had been raised in Brooklyn or Harlem, rather than in the suburbs of Connecticut. I grew up like Nella, in a very white neighborhood and went to a very white elementary school. I was told in high school I talked like a white girl by other Black people. That was a lot to navigate. I was in AP classes and other high level classes and most times, it was me and one other Black person.
Looking back on it now, I know that I was fortunate to be able to go to a really good public school. My dad moved us there specifically because it was the best public school in town. They had all these resources. We were able to do all of these things that a lot of other people, I learned as I got older, were not able to do.
Once I got older, I started to see how these things affected me, and what I really hated was that I was seen as not Black enough. I’ve always had this feeling because I grew up in these ways, and I was in Jack and Jill as a kid. So, that part of Diana’s character is something that resonates with me.
I would feel so insecure about having been fortunate and having been privileged, but also felt like, “I’m still a Black woman in America, the most disrespected woman.” I was always trying to figure out my class privilege and how that interacted with me being a Black woman, especially as I got older. Then I moved to New York and I saw what was happening with Eric Garner, Philando Castile. I saw more Black people in general moving through the world. I thought about this as I was writing the book as well.
AV: Nella and Hazel seem to be fighting for the top spot. At first, there’s some trust, but as time goes on, we realize that all skin-folk might not be kinfolk or the allyship we thought was there might not be. There’s a clear struggle between Nella wanting solidarity, but also wanting to show that she’s the Black employee to trust. Can you tell me more about this?
ZDH: There are white eyes watching them all the time, so they feel like, of course they’re going to be in a microscope because they are the only ones. This is something my dad told me happened with him when he was working at a very white office. Whenever Black people are sitting together in a mostly white place, it’s like, “Are they plotting something? Are they planning something?” But of course, Nella does want to be plotting things with Hazel. Maybe not overthrowing Wagner, but she does love the feeling of “us against the world.”
Nella also expects Hazel to want the same thing. Hazel suddenly doesn’t go with that, and it seems like she’s trying to mess with Nella’s position. Hazel’s code-switching plays a role, too. Nella had been telling herself—and Wagner was telling her, too—that she needs to strip herself of these desires, these wants, to diversify publishing. She was bringing a backup version of herself, whereas Hazel could suddenly bring all of these things to work and still maintain her Blackness. But that comes with a price, because what is Hazel doing to herself in order to be accepted?
That’s why we are so scared. We feel like we have to be a certain way to get through these doors. That’s how I felt. I’m hoping that we can talk about this, and also talk about how to make spaces more inclusive and diverse. Meaningfully inclusive, not just, “Here’s a Black person now, you guys are good right? Okay, bye.”
AV: We don’t see many psychological thrillers in office settings. You mentioned this earlier, when you talked about your influences, but what was it like writing a novel that hits so close to home and how were you able to make this setting both intriguing and sinister?
ZDH: It wasn’t very hard writing a novel close to home because writing Nella’s character was so easy to me, but I made the conscious decision at some point to write in third person. I didn’t want people to actually think this all happened to me. I love my coworkers, my bosses are wonderful. I didn’t necessarily have as many Black friends in publishing as I wanted to have, but I did have people who cared about how I was feeling and completely agreed that things needed to change. But it was hard.
But I’ve worked in a lot of offices. I’ve been working since I was 15 or 16. I worked in the medical records office in my hometown when I was in high school, and I worked at a recreation office in college. I think there’s something so fascinating about being in closed quarters. Even though they have an open floor plan at Wagner and she has her little cubicle, she’s always on display in a way, and even when she thinks she has privacy, she doesn’t.
Everyone can hear your conversations, everyone can smell what you’re eating. There’s just so much I could do with her senses—Nella smelling Hazel when she arrives, watching people walk by her cube. These are all such visceral things and I still remember how these things felt. I knew there could be so many opportunities to play with this drab space and mundane, everyday things, fully grating on Nella and also becoming really sinister and dark.
AV: Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
ZDH: I really wrote from the heart, from my soul, for me, but also for Black women. I wanted other Black women, not just ones who have worked in these environments, to see themselves in the hair references, the obscure music references, the TV references. It’s been really fun seeing Black women respond to this book, seeing the different things we take away from it. What I want non-Black readers to know is we’re not a monolith. We have very different views on things, we deserve to be heard, and we deserve to be there. There needs to be more of us. We should be in more places, we should be valued for all kinds of things, writing about all kinds of things.
I really hope that this book will show that to the publishing world that thinks, “Readers won’t be into this,” what could be possible. I want there to be more Black books. I want there to be other books that get the attention that they deserve. I want there to be comps in the future. When I was querying my agent, I was trying to think of books that were in a similar space, and it was hard. I just want there to be more.
We’re in the process of writing the pilot script for the Hulu adaptation. I took a whack at the first draft of the script and had so much fun just getting to live in a character a little longer. So book stuff is still my life, but hopefully, the TV side will play a big part in it, too.
I see a pediatrician’s office late in my wife’s pregnancy, a get-to-know you ritual to assess our fit. A three-minute drive from our house, the location was perfect, but the vibes were weird, and it all came to a head with a question: did you use a donor?No, I said, he’s just ours, and the whole thing went sideways.
It was the third trimester, quickly approaching the I’ll be pregnant forever phase. My hair was up, no makeup, but I realized suddenly that she hadn’t clocked me, that I passed, and now she was deeply confused. It’s counterintuitive, how a less-femme face scrambles stereotypes. More fundamentally, people like us just don’t fit in that context, our reality was so far from her expectations; it didn’t occur to her that we could be what we are.
Well, I’m trans, I said. I described IVF, preservation, how we got here. Recognition broke, the pediatrician fumbled, tried to recover and fumbled again—we never got back to easy conversation. I wasn’t embarrassed, not mad, just tired. As much as people say they support second moms, they need this biological scaffold to make sense of it, those Xs and Ys, moms and dads. Our bodies as they seemed, together and making a third, just didn’t make sense.
The prospect of becoming a mom as a trans woman, of specifically creating a new little life after transition, often feels like writing on a blank page. We humans rely on stories to make sense of overwhelming change, not just as practical maps for planning and preparation, but to expand our horizons, to envision new possibility. Trans women receive endless stories, from inside and out, but most figure us anywhere else but here.
The prospect of becoming a mom as a trans woman, of specifically creating a new little life after transition, often feels like writing on a blank page.
Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby is a breakthrough in many respects. It’s a revelation for many trans women to see a major press novel with such unvarnished inside perspectives on trans realities in all their complication, muck, and mess. It has provocative intentions, taking on and breaking open some of our most difficult conversations, right from its title. For a trans mom, having recently gone through the process of childbirth and infancy, it was remarkable to see a book write so boldly into the white space around trans motherhood, suggesting a future with fuller stories for us to lean on, expanding our notions of what stories we can embody.
Ames, a trans person in Brooklyn who detransitioned after years of living as a trans woman, has done something he didn’t think possible: he has accidentally gotten his boss Katrina pregnant. Ames’s life in detransition, presenting as a man once again, had just settled into a groove, easy if detached and grey. Now everything is chaos again. While Ames may be able to stuff himself back into a shape like man, the prospect of father is too much to bear; no matter what face we put on it, Ames realizes, babies see through us. Desperate for stability, Ames approaches his ex-girlfriend Reese, a trans woman whose own need for motherhood has lead her through many strange paths and dead ends, and proposes a remarkable scheme: the three of them raise the child together. For Ames, having trans women who see him fully promises to keep him grounded as the needs of parent pull in new directions. Reese agrees, nominally to see a car crash up close, while struggling to contain a last hope that this might finally be real. Katrina, for her part, is knocked flat by revelations of Ames’s trans past and present, not to mention his plan, as a stable family just coming into focus is dashed again. But something in the scheme touches a need Katrina holds too, a discomfort with upright cishet narratives that corroded her past attempts at family. Against their better judgment, the three decide to see where it goes.
There’s audacity in reading pregnancy next to transition, particularly trans femme transition. There are of course so many lines to be careful of: avoiding appropriation, recognizing what is shared and what is not. There’s such political fire beneath it, these zealously guarded boundaries. But the symmetries and overlaps are impossible to deny⎯and there can be reciprocal value there, offering new language and perspective where traditional stories and boxes so often fail us. I think of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, which famously reads her pregnancy alongside her partner Harry’s physical transition. How both processes can be like breaking through the ice, where true realities are much more complicated, messy and overwhelming than the stories we’re given. How the ways we are stigmatized and sanitized echo. How for all of us these processes of becoming reshape us and rebuild us, leaving us to wonder who we will be on the other side.
I see the bathroom where I knelt before my wife, my eyes at her navel. I pinched the skin on her belly, just as the video instructed. The syringe was ready. I’d never given a shot before, not to myself or anyone else, and we were both nervous as hell. It was astonishing how after so many years, after all we’d seen together, we could suddenly discover whole new intimacies, these new configurations of bodies, proximity and trust, control and purpose.
We agreed that I would handle the shots, three every day for that first month of the IVF cycle. Don’t be scared, the pharmacist said handing over giant draw needles, they look like they’re for a horse, but you don’t stick yourself with these. We took the package with wide eyes. Different shots had different formats: an injection pen in a green fabric case, prefilled syringes stored in the fridge, and these standard draw vials. The pharmacist also handed over a box of injection needles the size of a cigarette carton, one hundred in all, which held its own menace, suggesting a long haul, all the ways this could go wrong.
Nelson describes a similar scene as she sets her own pregnancy against her partner’s transition, the parallels of bodies in motion, their partnership of creation and becoming. After her Harry decides to go on T, she gives his shots, reflecting on the peace it brings and her own agency in it. “Each time I count the four rungs down on the blue ladder tattooed down your lower back, spread out the skin, and plunge the golden, oily T into deep muscle mass, I feel certain I am delivering a gift.”
The rebirth of our bodies is rarely a solitary act.
There is a specifically trans relationship in this space. The rebirth of our bodies is rarely a solitary act. Sometimes, it’s merely seeing someone else embody what we need, the possibility they open by living their own story. We receive stories that carry us from elders and family, from community, from mentors and doulas and midwives, books and GPs, endless fora where individual wisdom accretes to folk knowledge. But there is a particular connection when the means of transformation are literally in another’s hands.
The relationship of trans motherhood hangs all around Reese. So many of her own relationships in her trans community involve ties of trans motherhood, with lines often blurring between friendship, romance, and family. In this space, the specific motherhood in becoming has special weight. When people criticize her friend Thalia for an off-color joke at a funeral for another trans girl, Reese pulls rank. “Oh come on… you know who gave Tammi her first shot? Thalia. Right in the butt. Who are you to say if she can make a joke or not?” The point is clear: Thalia helped Tammi become Tammi in the most intimate terms. Their relationship is foundational, the bond beyond question.
On the first morning, it was just the two of us. The doctors sent a link to a bank of training videos, and I did my best. I never had a trans mom, had never done injections, instead placing two blue estrogen tabs my nurse practitioner prescribed under my tongue each morning and night. The videos all featured a woman alone, injecting herself, reflecting the isolation in this institutional, normative mother space. Each video started with a list of supplies, canned audio for each item, and the cadence of the voiceover reading sterile gauze looped through my head as I performed the ritual, swabbing vials and skin with alcohol, pulling oil into a barrel, swapping needles. My wife’s belly was pale and soft; it was familiar of course, but I’d never seen it quite like this. We marked the shots around her navel like hours on a clock, around and around, day by day. It was strange how all these changes devolved to a science problem: add hormones, and a body reads the instructions, responds, transforms.
Something familiar as we turned to the pregnancy process was the breadth of stories, how they suddenly came from everywhere. Once you are through that ice, you are overwhelmed by the realities of it, always more to know, always more to fear, and so much cannot be known until you are in it and living it. You are immediately sifting voices from every angle. There are doctors of course, as both transition and pregnancy have moved firmly into the medical world in the last 100 years. But so much comes from elsewhere; it’s often less about fact from fiction than instinct, grabbing what feels useful, letting fall what doesn’t.
Something familiar as we turned to the pregnancy process was the breadth of stories, how they suddenly came from everywhere.
Even with all this information, there were so many surprises. One night, about a year into transition, I came up behind my wife, and as she turned, my eyes missed her nose and met her chin instead. I stood against our bathroom doorframe with a carpenter’s triangle, like we did as kids, and marked my height: I’d lost an inch from HRT. On forums, half the girls said it was impossible, while the other half noted it had happened to them. Possible or not, I was now the short one. Late in the first trimester, we started to hear a lot about feet. Suddenly the conversation was everywhere—how they grow, how they change, not just the temporary swelling but permanently, forever. This hit my wife hard: hadn’t her borrowed shoes traced my first steps as a trans femme? Hadn’t she felt emboldened to appropriate my old clompy boy shoes, my black Chucks and Sambas, as she found space for her own newly-legible queerness?
Through the pregnancy, the stories I didn’t have became inscribed on my own body. As my wife gained weight, I kept pace. My face filled, my skin softened (don’t say glowed). My focus slipped, baby brain took hold. It’s difficult to describe these symmetries, acknowledging and respecting what is not shared, while facing what was real. I lacked any stories to properly hold what was happening to me—physically, in my own body—to confine or refine this sense of blurring. As her body changed in so many ways, mine shifted too.
In the flux space of pregnancy, I asked my NP about shots. Injectable hormones are so often held up in the folk wisdom, said to bring fuller embodiment. As a ritual, there is something so visceral and immediate to this act. Spending so much time with doctors, endless scans and hospital soap, I realized one day that my fear of needles was gone, replaced by an eagerness for agency, for control. The medical process of changing bodies was not just demystified, but there was momentum—a trans dynamic, that interplay of proximity and need. And after all, these shots would be the easy part. Sticking someone else, someone you love, is so much harder than taking control of yourself. As I watched my wife’s journey unfold, all the change she bore, this was nothing at all.
I insisted on shots in the belly. It wasn’t my NPs standard practice, but I pitched information scraped from community space with more members than any study, that accreted community wisdom. After doing her own homework, my NP agreed. I took that old green case and tore its guts out, remaking it as an injection kit, and stuffed it with supplies I learned from the training videos. The box of 100 needles was barely touched after our early success. Preparing for my first shot, alone in my bathroom, the cadence of sterile gauze still rang through my head.
For Reese, breastfeeding is a foregone conclusion. As they share more and more, as the bond of their mutual project deepens, Katrina is surprised to learn that trans women can breastfeed. Reese knows all about it, but in messy queer fashion her information came sideways. Her stories come from fetish space, from cis men living their own body anxiety through her body, knowing their own flesh had that potential too. And so this is how Reese came to own a manual pump already, a gift stuffed in a sock drawer.
Standing with Katrina in a bougie baby store, staring into a case of sleek baby-blue electric pumps, Reese wants to tell Katrina of the eroticism in motherhood. Even this store. Look at it! A sanctum of femaleness, of private domestic acts. She wants to blow up so many discussions we bury about the capaciousness of pregnancy and transition, all the lines that get blurred and crossed, the queerness here. In an earlier chapter, Ames experiences a breakthrough of personal discovery in Glamour Boutique, a crossdresser fetish shop; the baby store serves as a funhouse reflection, all the drag that comes with procreation.
Nelson dives deep into the way these queer realities of the body, including eroticism, inhere to the process of motherhood, only to be met with stigma and shame. She discusses the sharp privacy of breastfeeding itself, with its reminders of the animal body. It’s another area where a whole new language opens up once you’re past the shroud—colostrum, letdown, hindmilk. Visual records of the act are limited to pumping manuals and, she notes parenthetically, porn. Nelson turns over an image from an art show, where a woman pumps while staring into the camera; she marvels at the way that radical intimacy in queer media often sounds in genres of danger, suffering, abjection, but here the queerness is nourishment from the body. Nelson pushes not only against mainstream discomfort but queer culture too—where queerness is so often idealized in the masculine, against anything too close to the female animal, she seeks a vision of queerness unbound and capacious enough to hold this too.
Reese picks up this precise conversation, staking a claim to the same mess and complexity for our stigmatized femme bodies. There is reciprocity for Katrina as well; this opening is what she needs too. She confesses how, without Reese, she would run from the store screaming. For Katrina, with all her discomfiture around the normative glowing mother story, for whom conformity is alienating, this queer liberation that Reese seems to promise looks something like a life she can live.
One of the first changes a trans girl notices is soreness in her chest. Long before breasts grow in earnest, nipples and glands reconfigure, reading instruction and transforming. This often includes, briefly, a few drops of milk. During pregnancy, though I decided against the induction protocol, the milk returned. Always two drops, just two. Whatever the explanation, it arrived and remained well through his first year, until he was weaned. In that time it was a constant reminder of the proximity of our bodies, the blurring, and the distance that remains.
As a trans woman, this notion cuts deep. Our bodies have always been figured as toxic.
Nelson turns over another idea called the toxic maternal, literally the poison in our milk. Toxins are everywhere these days, so that the question is never whether there is poison, but its degree, whether it is safe. As a trans woman, this notion cuts deep, part metaphor, part practicality. Our bodies have always been figured as toxic, an assumption that has founded laws to keep us from having children, or courts taking our children away. Gatekeepers once asserted that to protect children from transition, “young children are better told that their parents are divorcing and that Daddy will be living far away and probably unable to see them.” This language is resurgent in contemporary hate campaigns, where talk of “safeguarding” and “grooming” of children loom large. It’s a core story that society hands us about what this all means.
This sense of toxic maternal was close in mind as I decided early to forgo breastfeeding protocols. I told myself it was practical, a lack of stories proving safety. I read about trans women who did, but the stories didn’t cover nettlesome specifics, like the safety of testosterone blocker medication in milk. And then it struck me that I had been looking too narrowly, seeking only trans stories. My hormone blockers were, like most trans medicine, prescribed mostly to cis women to treat various conditions. I was not asking a trans question at all, but a woman question. Still, when I brought this to our OBGYN, she was leery. I folded quickly, shut the door and stayed on course, accepting that this body just isn’t safe enough.
When our son was 18 months old, I read Reese’s certainty, and doubt crept in again. I dig deeper. Either science had caught up since then, or I simply chose not to see it. But then it was never truly a science question. It was about little cooler bags of pumped milk handed to daycare staff. It was about a shirt lifted in public, a baby clambering for a chest as people pretend not to look, but look. It was about a story that was no longer just mine, but my son’s first and foremost. Against this, Reese’s certainty is bittersweet. I think of girls who come after who can read themselves into that confidence, how the opened conversation creates more narrative possibility for them, for their full complexity, for queerness and nourishment, for things that will no longer be too much to ask.
In imagining space for her own queer family, Reese recalls a trans man in Chicago she’d met who, along with his husband and a lesbian couple, started a large combined family. They renovated an old Victorian house by the lakeshore, carving two living spaces separated by an open staircase. The cis husband provided genetic material, both women conceived, and all four raised their kids together as equal parents. By the time that the kids realized most people only have two parents, they viewed their peers with sadness for their lack.
I think of a small hand-made quilt, perfect for a baby bed. It was gorgeous, intricate, and so we were stunned to learn that it was the first our trans man friend had ever stitched. I think of a crocheted unicorn doll, white with a mane of rainbow yarn, that a lesbian friend’s mother made for the occasion. From our cishet friends we receive hand-me-down boxes of utility gear, all the practical sundry needed to keep a baby alive, fed, and rash-free. But the gifts from queer community, queer family, were something else entirely.
We expected a pulling-back, a separation, as we began a process often seen as anathema to queerness. And yet, as the baby became imminent, I was astonished by the excitement of so many in my queer circles, a palpable difference from the nods of cishet friends. There was triumph in it, an investment that transcended the usual respectful distance, as if this rare things wasn’t just for my wife and me, but for all of us—a deeper understanding of what community really means.
In his first few months, we performed a special kind of assessment. Friends dropped by to hold him, and we noted who had that spark, who took most readily to that connection. Our vision for all of this, building a world around this tiny human, relied on a circle of adults, particularly our queer friends. We simply couldn’t envision doing this alone. Our queer circles skew trans masc, and with our femme selves already established we had a special interest in finding trans uncles and godthems to balance and expand the tones of in his early life.
We spun a story to support us in this, filling the missing pieces, our community there to provide all kinds of faces and experiences to fill his world. And then, March 2020, we were reminded how little control we really had. He was 7 months old when the pandemic hit. When lockdown began, he couldn’t even crawl yet; by the time that we saw a light at the end, more than a year later, he ran down forest trails, read books, did downward dogs, watered my garden from a bubbling hose. For all our attempt to write it differently, we were all that he had, and we needed to be enough.
Ames, turning over his anxiety about parenthood, remarks how a baby sees through you. Parenthood itself is not scary to him. What’s frightening is a role he could not fit: the role of father. His instinct is to seek a community that could sustain him—specifically the fellowship of trans women, people who see him as he truly is, as the new being’s needs take hold. For Ames, much of the ease of detransition came from how little is asked of a middle class white man, how easily he skates by. This baby’s need tears that all down. It will know him, and he cannot have this baby know him as he is.
Ordinary devotion is a concept that Nelson considers, from developmental psychologist Donald Winnicott: how a mother’s simple task is to give yourself completely to your infant’s need. To give your body, your mind, your energy, your purpose. It’s interesting to set this beside transition, as Nelson does with Harry. Transition is the fulfillment of personal need. We often say that the best thing you can be for others is yourself, that it’s offensive (and it is) for family to place their sense of need ahead of yours. But entering the parent space specifically, so much doubt arises.
We often say that the best thing you can be for others is yourself. But entering the parent space specifically, so much doubt arises.
Late in the novel, as Reese’s dreams once again seem to crash down, she stands on the shore facing a derelict sanitarium, speaking aloud to the ghosts: I lost my baby. Not a hypothetical baby, but this baby. A baby that could still get to be a baby, but only without her—her abnegation an essential act to bring it into being.
This notion, giving your body for a baby, has a strange spin for the trans mother. Many have denied their personal need, stayed in a body shaped like father, for the sake of their children to be or the children that are; to do otherwise, as the story goes, is selfish. Or we find ourselves at a place where we have finally come into the body we need, only to face the prospect of losing it for the chance to make a child.
Peters has spoken of the comma in the title of Detransition, Baby as a pivot, a razor. I read it and see a line of decisions, all the times on this road where I had to make the choice between the body I needed and that hypothetical child. I see the Medicaid clinic room where I initiated my trans care, my NP and I reading preservation reports we didn’t understand, discovering that something was wrong. I recall that sharp fork: do I take hormones to remake my body the right way, or take other hormones to make it a father. I recall our compromise, assured that future IVF would still work at least. I see my own office, the day after our retrieval seemed to fail because my material had failed, right back at the same fork: would I detransition for the chance to complete this? On one side, I knew I had chosen something essential with transition, remaking a body and self I needed in ways I couldn’t even imagine before I found it. There were other ways to have a child. And yet. There’s that trans reality again, the relationship between proximity and need, how the closer you are to the practical possibility of embodiment, the more present and compelling the need becomes. The truth was, I had already attached to this baby, the one we saw together, the one we were making together. With both sides of the scale heavier than ever, I knew that I would try—a new story, another blank page. And then the phone rings, my wife, with news.
I see a bright morning, a Saturday in late summer of 2020, and our one-year-old son played with my wife in our living room. I looked on through the open bathroom door, preparing for shot day, an event that had now become a grounding ritual, a necessary moment I anticipate all week. I opened the old box of needles, and the last one fell out. I stood for a minute shaking the empty cardboard box, the same one we took wide-eyed at the pharmacy when this all started, the one hundred needles now spent. My son climbed over my wife, reaching under her sweater, insistent, close to weaning but not there yet. Two bodies became three bodies. Bodies changed shape together, in passing and in tandem. I held an empty cardboard box, what was left of the needles that precipitated all of it. It’s hard not to think of Nelson’s Argo conceit, her story to frame their passage through transitions, the ship replaced bit by bit until no part is the same. There are so many valences of story for experiences like this, sometimes a mythic allusion, sometimes a spent case of needles. Laying out supplies, even now, I hear the same cadence.
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